Retired Execs Fill Non-profit Consulting Niche

November 01, 1991|By Lisa Newman.

As retired treasurer of Inland Steel Industries Inc., Robert Greenebaum says he could make about $200 an hour in consulting fees. Instead, he chooses to charge less than $5 an hour-and he doesn`t even pocket the money.

Greenebaum, 74, is a member of the Executive Service Corps of Chicago, a group of 723 formerly high-powered executives who find retirement too dull. Hardly strapped for cash, in good health and in top form, these executives are finding they can put their idle skills to use helping struggling non-profit organizations in the Chicago area.

``The (corps) fills a niche, for the retiree and the agency,`` said Jeanne Aronson, 63, who spends 30 to 50 hours a month on its projects.

In 1981, when Greenebaum left Inland Steel after more than 40 years, he was 64, but he didn`t waste any time trying to enjoy a quiet retirement.

``I came here a couple of days after retirement,`` Greenebaum said. ``I went to see if they were interested in putting me to work.``

Greenebaum`s initial concern-whether he could offer anything to the organization-is common, according to A. Dean Swift, 73, corps chairman and a former president of Sears, Roebuck and Co.

``(Executives) want to know if their expertise in business can be transferred to a volunteer consultant for a non-profit,`` Swift said. ``Most of them say, `Look Swift, I`ve spent 40 years with my company and thought of nothing but my family and my business. Now I`ve got the time, I`m reasonably well-off with a pension and so on.```

And they tell him they ``want to give something back ... do something besides make money,`` Swift said. ``Most of them can do it.``

Aronson says after years at the top, retirees find it an eye-opener to come to work at the ragtag offices of a struggling social services agency.

She has spent two years helping Tuesday`s Child, a family crisis center on the North Side. Often she spends late evenings on the phone with executive director Victoria Lavigne, who with partner Katherine Augustyn has been running the small agency on a shoestring.

``Consultants have to be sensitive that we have a different way of looking at the world,`` said Lavigne. ``I`m a psychologist, and I still work one day a week at the organization. If I gave that up, I`m afraid I`d become like all those MBAs. If you get too far removed, it forces you to look at the bottom line.``

The retirees work part time, charging a small fee (from $100 to $500) for the corps` administrative costs, though corporate sponsorship covers most of its $1.3 million annual budget.

Volunteers travel to locations as diverse as Brookfield Zoo or the Greater Chicago Food Depository. And they also help governmental bodies in need, such as the Chicago Board of Education. (The organization has no affiliation with the Service Corps of Retired Executives, a group of retirees who provide assistance and conduct management seminars under the auspicies of the federal Small Business Administration.)

This year, Executive Service Corps volunteers devoted 40,000 hours to 375 projects. In its most extensive project, some 100 retirees followed the lead of Don Schroeter, former Amoco Foundation executive director, who inspired them to work with an organization called West Side Future to improve 34 Chicago public schools.

Recently, the organization asked the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson to develop, at no charge, a new recruitment campaign featuring some of its few women and minority members in an attempt to diversify the organization.

To some extent, that`s because in its 13 years, the corps has often looked like a graying men`s club.

There are about 80 women members today and fewer minorities, said Mary Felish, a corps spokeswoman.

``There weren`t that many women in business in my generation,`` said volunteer Jessalyn Nicklas, an Inverness resident who before her

semiretirement in 1983 helped run a family manufacturing business and was instrumental in establishing Harper College in Palatine.

Nicklas said when volunteers step in they have to be blunt. ``Many of the non-profits don`t realize they should run as a business,`` she said. ``When you help them to see it that way, then they take off like a rocket.``

But things don`t always work out. Greenebaum, who was recently inducted into the corps` Hall of Fame along with Schroeter and four other longtime volunteers, recalled how a major charitable organization once bickered so much about its board structure that his idea ``was to act like grownups and organize on a businesslike basis. It was really a mess,`` he said.

Ultimately, he said, his suggestion was rejected.

That`s one reason the job of aiding fledgling agencies, which can rarely afford private consultants, is difficult at best, said corps President Dennis Zavac. ``We`re consultants,`` he said, ``not miracle workers.``